Write HTML file using Java

Solution 1:

If you want to do that yourself, without using any external library, a clean way would be to create a template.html file with all the static content, like for example:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" 
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<title>$title</title>
</head>
<body>$body
</body>
</html>

Put a tag like $tag for any dynamic content and then do something like this:

File htmlTemplateFile = new File("path/template.html");
String htmlString = FileUtils.readFileToString(htmlTemplateFile);
String title = "New Page";
String body = "This is Body";
htmlString = htmlString.replace("$title", title);
htmlString = htmlString.replace("$body", body);
File newHtmlFile = new File("path/new.html");
FileUtils.writeStringToFile(newHtmlFile, htmlString);

Note: I used org.apache.commons.io.FileUtils for simplicity.

Solution 2:

A few months ago I had the same problem and every library I found provides too much functionality and complexity for my final goal. So I end up developing my own library - HtmlFlow - that provides a very simple and intuitive API that allows me to write HTML in a fluent style. Check it here: https://github.com/fmcarvalho/HtmlFlow (it also supports dynamic binding to HTML elements)

Here is an example of binding the properties of a Task object into HTML elements. Consider a Task Java class with three properties: Title, Description and a Priority and then we can produce an HTML document for a Task object in the following way:

import htmlflow.HtmlView;

import model.Priority;
import model.Task;

import java.io.FileOutputStream;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.PrintStream;

public class App {

    private static HtmlView<Task> taskDetailsView(){
        HtmlView<Task> taskView = new HtmlView<>();
        taskView
                .head()
                .title("Task Details")
                .linkCss("https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.3.6/css/bootstrap.min.css");
        taskView
                .body().classAttr("container")
                .heading(1, "Task Details")
                .hr()
                .div()
                .text("Title: ").text(Task::getTitle)
                .br()
                .text("Description: ").text(Task::getDescription)
                .br()
                .text("Priority: ").text(Task::getPriority);
        return taskView;
    }

    public static void main(String [] args) throws IOException{
        HtmlView<Task> taskView = taskDetailsView();
        Task task =  new Task("Special dinner", "Have dinner with someone!", Priority.Normal);

        try(PrintStream out = new PrintStream(new FileOutputStream("Task.html"))){
            taskView.setPrintStream(out).write(task);
            Desktop.getDesktop().browse(URI.create("Task.html"));
        }
    }
}

Solution 3:

You can use jsoup or wffweb (HTML5) based.

Sample code for jsoup:-

Document doc = Jsoup.parse("<html></html>");
doc.body().addClass("body-styles-cls");
doc.body().appendElement("div");
System.out.println(doc.toString());

prints

<html>
 <head></head>
 <body class=" body-styles-cls">
  <div></div>
 </body>
</html>

Sample code for wffweb:-

Html html = new Html(null) {{
    new Head(this);
    new Body(this,
        new ClassAttribute("body-styles-cls"));
}};

Body body = TagRepository.findOneTagAssignableToTag(Body.class, html);
body.appendChild(new Div(null));

System.out.println(html.toHtmlString());
//directly writes to file
html.toOutputStream(new FileOutputStream("/home/user/filepath/filename.html"), "UTF-8");

prints (in minified format):-

<html>
<head></head>
<body class="body-styles-cls">
    <div></div>
</body>
</html>